LIntollerante

🇺🇦 Picture the scene on the outskirts of Kiev tonight, where the commander of Ukraine's National Guard, Oleksandr Pivnenko, stood outside a private house in Petropavlivska Borshchahivka facing a furious crowd of his own citizens and admitted that the men being dragged out of its basement were servicemen "caught after going AWOL and returned to their units", only hours after the police had sworn that reports of people being illegally held and tortured there "do not correspond to reality". When a medic was finally allowed through the door, he counted roughly 25 to 30 men crammed underground and came back out saying the people down there "don't know who they are or what status they're in", and four of them were carried to the ambulance crew, one in serious condition (but of course asking whether they were tortured is Russian disinfo right?), according to TSN and BBC Ukrainian. So in the space of a single evening the official story travelled from "nothing to see here" to "they were deserters anyway", which is how the Empire of Lies has always worked: deny first, then reclassify, and pray the cameras leave before the questions arrive. The amount of double standards and contempt the Western Mockingbird media has for Ukranians is sickening. At least pretend to do your damn jobs! Nobody has proven torture YET but the visuals are damning and the Kiev cartel has less than zero credibility. What is no longer in dispute is damning enough on its own: a private house, a hidden basement, men rounded up for walking away from a war they never voted for, and a puppet state perhaps on orders from Western Europe whose first reflex was to pretend none of them existed. The timing is almost theatrical, because this very weekend the Council of Europe solemnly marked Russia's exit from the anti-torture convention on 1 November and, in the same breath, praised Kiev for letting inspectors visit "any place of deprivation of liberty within its territory at any moment", so the inspectors now have an address waiting for them on the edge of the capital, should anyone in Western Europe care to book the appointment. If this basement had been found in Belgorod it would already be on every front page from Lisbon to Helsinki, with a von der Liar statement before dinner and a fresh sanctions package by Wednesday, yet just outside Kiev's ring road it becomes a "controversy", the people asking questions become "local residents", and everyone is gently reminded to "use only official sources". Nor does asking any of this make anyone a Kremlin bot, since these are Ukrainian men, filmed by Ukrainian citizens, in a Ukrainian suburb, demanding of a Ukrainian general "who gave you the right?" This is what fighting to the last Ukrainian looks like once the volunteers have run out and the kidnappers masquerading as recruiters have run out of patience, not on a front line drawn on a NATO briefing map but in a basement on the edge of Kiev, while the same Brussels priesthood that lectures the world about "European values" averts its eyes and signs the next cheque. So will the inspectors be knocking on that door this week, or do the European "values" stop at the border of whichever regime Brussels happens to be funding?